


Not so Luck

by Ruexla



Category: Sovereign: The Most Amazing Comic Ever
Genre: Denial of Feelings, M/M, No Puppies were Harmed, One was Mildly Humiliated, Uninvited Angst? In MY fic?! It's More Likely Than You Think, Zoltarian Levels of Denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 09:36:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13361790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruexla/pseuds/Ruexla
Summary: In which private Perkins does not sneak out to do completely irresponsible things with a stupid sky pirate who won't stop kissing him.This is not his fault.Stupid pirates.





	Not so Luck

“It's so good to be out here!” 

“Hrmph.”

“Alone! With just you.”

“Mm.”

“Just us. Together. By ourselves.”

Percy remains quiet, deciding that even nonverbal acknowledgments are too good for Edvard at this particular point in time. He keeps his eyes on the trail so that he doesn't have to look at the stupid man with his stupid voice using stupid words to imply stupid, _stupid_ ...implications.

This situation is not Percy's fault. In any way. At all. Whatsoever. 

Edvard stretched. Percy watched his obnoxiously long shadow ripple across the sand ahead of them. One of the descending arms came down to rest across Percy's shoulders. 

Because of course it did.

“This was a great idea. You have very good ideas.”

Percy swallows.

Nope, nope, _nope._

Still not his fault. 

“Shut up,” he mumbles, “You were being— and this is just-- we're on a patrol.”

Right. That is what they are doing. Patrolling. It's an easy rout because he is still recovering, and he'd invited the stupid pirate because...

...Because...

...Because it would stop him from annoying the palace personnel and generally getting underfoot. Yes. Edvard was bad for performance. Distracting. He tended to attract unwarranted attention from people who had real jobs to do, jobs which did not involve standing around and... and giggling. 

Percy could never work out what the giggling was about, exactly. Once, while giggling was occurring in the corridor outside of his room, one very misguided matron had stopped to pat Percy's hand. She wore an expression which Percy could not identify but which he nevertheless found extremely objectionable. She winked at him and bustled away before he could glare her into submission.

"Sure," Edvard agrees, with the kind of idiot ostentation that might tempt a temperance man to whiskey or murder, "Patrolling. That too.” The arm around Percy's shoulder tugs him closer. Edvard stops. Percy, despite several instincts to the contrary, stops too.

Edvard really is obnoxiously tall.

And obnoxiously close. And obnoxiously... _himself._

Obnoxious. 

Same thing.

Percy shudders. It's a reasonable reaction to the ongoing invasion of personal space. 

To the sense of having stepped into a skin one size too small for him. 

To having a head full of vague, prickly presentiments of--

Of _implications._

Because there's a hand sliding up the back of his neck, another resting lightly above his hip, and, between them, an obnoxiously tall person blocking out the sun. 

Percy fists a hand into the breast of the man's stupid, melodramatic red jacket. “You--”

“Mmmm?” 

Percy looks up at Edvard's backlit face. The morning sunlight has turned the pirate's red-gold hair into an extremely inappropriate halo. He feels the heat in his own face. Minute muscles threaten to tic. The traitors.

This is stupid. 

This is _stupid._

And it isn't Percy's fault. 

“You--”

“Mm.” 

Edvard is, to Percy's eyes, now outdoing himself in the art of offensive looming. Bastard. Percy feels boxed in, flushed, furious, and entirely too small.

They're on patrol. Patrolling. 

_(There were too many people in the infirmary. Too many giggling people. And it wasn't like Percy had his own room in the barracks--)_

Percy had no ulterior motives. He isn't responsible for an idiot pirate's moronic misapprehensions about the ulterior motives which he does not have. 

He himself would never anticipate this... _thisness!_

He'd been confused, ok? When he... came back. And Edvard was there, taking credit for that, and neither of them were dead, and Percy couldn't be expected to be thinking straight, and it was. 

It was easier. Easier than this. 

His knee prickles. The palace cells were cold. The hand was warm. His skin remembers the difference. 

Edvard, reaching through the bars and. 

_"You've got to believe us by now."_

It was all entirely too much. It still is. 

“You." Percy releases Edvard's shirt and jabs a finger into his chest. "You made me walk the plank.”

Edvard blinks. He doesn't straighten up or back off, but his eyes seem to refocus on a different future. "What? No. I didn't!"

“You did!” Percy snaps, and the strangeness from a moment ago passes. The world makes sense again. He's back in familiar emotional territory. “It was your idea! You suggested it!"

“No," Edvard protests, "Plank-walking was the captain's idea!”

“You reminded her!”

Edvard takes a moment to collect himself, hand sliding to Percy's shoulder as if he's about to let go. Percy tenses. 

Edvard does not let go. 

Because he's obnoxious. And clingy. And annoying. And persistent.

Percy relaxes. He focuses on being mad. 

Edvard gives him a look which is somewhere between contrition and reproach. 

“We weren't _really_ going to. We'd never. You know that.”

“I didn't at the time!”

Edvard manages to retain his soulful expression for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth twitch.

“You didn't,” he agrees, voice reeking with the memory of stifled laughter, “You really didn't.”

“Wha-- you-- you're-- _are you laughing at me?"_

“Nooooooo...” Edvard protests.

“Yes! Yes you are!”

“Well, ok!” Edvard pouts. Percy punches him.

Edvard flops backwards into the sand. He's laughing. His legs tangle in Percy's shins and then, somehow, Percy is down on top of him.

“Ok, but you were," Edvard's hands flap vaguely a few inches from Percy's face as Percy pushes himself upright. His own hands are braced on the pirate's chest. This, he can't help but noticing, leaves them just a few inches away from a tempting chokehold. "And we thought you might be evil! And an assassin! A really cute evil assassin!"

"I wasn't!"

"But if you _were_ then we would have been scaring you for your own good!"

“That-- how does that even-- Urgh! I wasn't! And you weren't!”

“Well, we know each other better now.” Edvard shows both hands palms-up and contrives a Very Serious and Sincere face. 

Percy folds his arms tightly and glares down at him. “You,” he says, straightening his back to deliver the verdict with every scrap of defensive dignity he can muster while straddling the man's hips, “are a smug, sadistic, ridiculous manchild.”

Edvard considers the accusations. The reproachful expression returns. "Ridiculous?"

Percy slides his hand under the band of Edvard's theatrical eyepatch. His fingers tangle in a fistfull of hair. He doesn't even try not to enjoy Edvard's wince as the pirate's dark-accustomed eye is rudely confronted by daylight.

"Ridiculous," he affirms. 

And then it's gone. Anger. Spite. Even the anxiety. For a moment, all Percy can feel is empty. 

"Why'd you stay?" It's an incomplete question, but there's no safe or graceful way to ask the real one. 

_'Why do you_ think _you stayed?'_

_'Because really, Edvard, what were you looking for? What are you expecting to find?'_

_'And how am I supposed to handle it when you don't?'_

Edvard is silent for a moment. Percy looks down at the hand on his knee. Then he looks away. Looks at nothing. 

Edvard squeezes gently. Gingerly. As if he's scared the gesture might break something. 

_Stupid._

"Because I like you."

Percy tries to find a whole lot more of nothing to look at. 

"And you like me too, right? Puppy? Percy? Even though I'm those things you were saying?" 

Fingers brush his jaw. Chin. Lips. Percy looks down. 

Edvard's eyes aren't fair.

_Who's the puppy now?_ Percy gripes, trying to be irritated. He'd rather be irritated. His head is empty of an answer, but Edvard is still talking.

"And it's ok to be those things sometimes, right? A little?" Edvard's hand falls to Percy's thigh. 

Percy tries to swallow and clear his throat at the same time. He wants to look away. He also doesn't want to look away. So he doesn't.

_Fuck._

"I like you," Edvard says. He shifts slightly, grip growing firmer. "I like you a lot." His voice slides between registers, creeping from _'idiot sincerity'_ to _'not-idiot and sincerely... implicatious'_ as if Edvard hopes that Percy won't let himself notice that he's noticing, “and I want to know you really, really, _really_ well.”

"Stupid," Percy tells him. Voice thick. Cracking. 

It isn't easy but, just for a moment, it's easy enough.

_'Stupid,'_ he tells himself again, but only for internal consumption. He's too much otherwise occupied to say it out loud.

\- - -

They can't.

Edvard knows that, but he isn't above talking about it. Begging about it, even. Edvard, in these circumstances, isn't above anything. Except Percy.

Above Percy is a very good place to be. The best, really, but also a bit rough because-- as he's not above telling Percy-- of all the things he _could_ and _would_.

But can't. 

"Oh, for fuck's sake--"

Edvard watches Percy twist around and scrabble through the contents of his kit. 

"Here. Idiot." 

Oh. 

_Oh._

Edvard takes the flask and buries his grin in the crook of Percy's neck.

"You're smart!" he praises. 

"Shut up..."

"And so prepared!"

"Shut. Up."

"...Planning ahead like this."

_"There was no plan!"_

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
